


animal band

by LightningRidgeBlackOpal



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Multi, Requests, available for suggestions, prompts, random one shots
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-26
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2019-12-18 05:38:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18243458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LightningRidgeBlackOpal/pseuds/LightningRidgeBlackOpal
Summary: Just a place for random, short prompts or requests that don't really have enough weight for their own post. Will continue to update. Each chapter will be an independent story with it's own tags and warnings, but I'll update relationship and character tags as needed.





	1. so you stumble in devotion

**Author's Note:**

> first prompt: A 1000 word story about an emotional breakup with no hard feelings

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for a breakup? Emotionality? Sap?

“So, what? That’s it?” Ryan asked. He could feel the burning weight of tears welled up in his eyes, but they hadn’t started to fall yet. “After all of this, you’re just out?” he continued. Shane still hadn’t said anything, hadn’t even looked up to meet his eyes.

“Come on. You know it’s not that simple,” Shane said. The tears hadn’t fallen yet. “This is the hardest fucking thing I’ve had to do.” It felt like a lie; it struck him like one. Like the force of a punch in his gut. “I can’t do it anymore. The show. I have to… Ryan, please.”

Maybe he looked over; now Ryan’s eyes were on the floor, on the wall, caught on all of the stuff in his apartment that would just be a reminder of them. “So you can’t do the show,” he said. His voice was more steady than his heartbeat. “Ok. I get that. But you’re gonna call it quits on us too?” he asked. He still wouldn’t look over. Wouldn’t look at the face in front of him; once so familiar, soon to be a stranger.

“Look, Ry,” he said, “it’s not that I don’t… I still… look. I love you so much, but do you really want to do long distance? I’m not just quitting the show. I’m quitting the job, I’m quitting LA. I have to head back to Illinois and I just… don’t think I’m coming back.”

The tears hadn’t fallen yet.

Ryan moved away, walked into the kitchen to pour a glass of water. He drank it slowly, took the time to think. Shane stayed in the living room, statue still. He finished and placed the cup back on the counter, walked back to face his boyfriend - his ex boyfriend - again.

“This isn’t how I thought this would all go,” he said and Shane just frowned, shook his head. “Me either,” he said.

It wasn’t enough. None of it, none of this conversation would be enough to encompass how devastated he was. “What did I do wrong?” he asked and Shane shook his head emphatically.

“That isn’t it. Ry, I need you to know that isn’t it. You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not because either of us fucked up it’s just… circumstance. It’s just how it is,” Shane said. Ryan couldn’t fathom it, couldn’t make sense of it. He couldn’t think of any circumstance that could drag him out of Shane’s arms kicking and screaming. He’d never let go of anything in his life, now that he thinks about it. Not by choice anyway.

“Well what’s got you running back to Illinois then? What’s got you running away from this?” Ryan asked. A challenge. Shane just looked tired; older; worn down. He looked like an old man. “A funeral,” he said simply.

“I want you to know that these have been the best years of my life. Unsolved. Us. All of it. This has been the best thing to happen to me by far,” Shane said. The tears still welled up hot and burned at his eyes. They hadn’t fallen.

“Same. For me, I mean. Meeting you… I never thought I would find something like this.” Ryan’s voice wasn’t strong. He felt exhausted by it; the whole afternoon spoiled. “I just wish we could make it work,” he said. Shane took a few careful steps forward and pulled him into an embrace, held him close.

“Me too, Ry. I wish I didn’t have to go.”

But he did. He had to go, and he went. Once he was alone there he fell into a pile on the couch, then the tears fell. He allowed it, gave himself in to it completely. A spoiled afternoon; a wasted night. The dread of Monday morning up ahead like a bright yellow sign. Caution in big bold black.

What was he going to do? Lost his co-host and his boyfriend in one fell swoop. Everyone at the office could tell he was down. He listened to his bosses panic about who could replace Shane and how the fans would react and what to do about the deep dark circles under Ryan’s eyes. He knocked on the door and told them he was taking a vacation. Just a week, just a week. Head home and find himself.

The sun was the same, the same bright sun as back in LA and the same bright sun in Illinois. Somehow, though, with his mom making lunch and his dad and him in front of the TV yelling about the Lakers and with Jake laughing while Ryan pushed him into the pool, it all felt warmer. Brighter. Like everywhere else in his life there was a haze of cloud cover but here, home, the clouds had all burned off. Like all of his clouds were burning off; and now his shoulders were bare to freckle up and his cheeks flushed with laughter. And maybe this was okay? Maybe it would be, at least. 

“So what happened?” Jake asked, late into his trip. Ryan looked up and away from his laptop where he was writing an email to his boss about their suggestions for new hosts, and he just looked at Jake for a while.

“Things just happened. Like, big life things. Circumstance. It just didn’t work out.” Ryan said. Jake shook his head and whistled low.

“It’s a shame. I was just coming around to the big guy,” he said and Ryan laughed. A loud, sudden laugh startled from him. Maybe it was because it was the first time this trip he’d laughed or maybe it was just because it was summer, but he really felt like it was okay.

“Yeah. I can’t sit here and blame him for having to do what’s best for him, right? I can’t sit here and be pissed about it because it’s just life, you know?” Jake shook his head, and Ryan laughed. He may not, now, but he would. Eventually he would learn too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from The Distillers - Love is Paranoid


	2. and oh my love remind me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Abstractly prompted by Trash-lez who said "channel your stress about moving into a story about the lads moving in together" and then I ran with it and did whatever this is.
> 
> Chapter contains A Guy At A Bar Being A Creep, so, warning for that I guess.

There’s something about moving that never gets less stressful no matter how many times you do it. Something in the way you place your whole life, everything you own, in a pile or in a truck and have to think, _that’s it_? _That_ ’ _s all I_ ’ _ve got_. _That_ ’ _s everything_. Like there comes a moment when you realize that you could just walk away from the pile and start over.

Something about it just sits at an odd angle from you, a Moiré effect pattern across the whole of you and distorts the way you’ve looked at your entire life up until then. The room you were in just walls, and all your stuff in a pile.

Ryan hasn’t gotten used to moving yet, and he thinks he never will. The stress of it and the motion of it. He hates it. So he’s here, so he’s sitting in the empty walls that used to be his apartment and he’s just staring at the spot where his couch was and it’s just carpet. So he’s here, so he’s stressed, so he’s crying. It’s just all a lot, right? But then the mover is there and he’s saying, “you riding with me or driving ahead?” and he has to get up and dust himself off and throw the last bag of his stuff into his car and drive.

It’s not even that far, is the worst part. He gets to the apartment building and he walks around to his door and he shoves the key in the lock and swings the door open. Immediately the movers bustle past him and there’s his couch; found it! There’s his bookshelf and his coffee table; found ‘em! They were right there all along, just stuff.

He feels foolish, in a way you only can in your mid twenties. Like you just know you should be better at everything by now. But he moves and he rearranges and two hours later he’s in a new place that looks more or less like his old place. He sits down on the couch and he cracks open a beer. No part of him feels excited. Then his phone rings.

“Hey!” Shane’s voice greets him, tinny over the bad reception. “You all moved in?” he asks. Behind his voice, in the static, Ryan can hear people and traffic.

“Yeah, yeah,” he says and Shane hums thoughtful on the other end. “I’m not feeling too excited, I guess,” he says.

“What’s the matter, Ry?” Shane asks. Ryan pauses for a long time. Takes several sips of his beer and listens to the faint sounds of Shane walking along the sidewalk. He must have had to go somewhere, the store maybe. “You got the Big Changes Blues?” he asks.

Ryan laughs, a short noise startled out of him. “Guess so,” he says and then it’s quiet again. He finishes his beer and gets up to toss the empty and grab another, and he’s back on the couch by the time he feels ready to continue. “I just feel sick of it I guess. All the moving around. This is my third fucking apartment since I graduated. It just seems like… it’s not permanent. Like it hardly matters.”

“Hm,” Shane says. “Of course it’s not permanent, my man. Barely anything is. You think you’re gonna be lonely?”

Ryan just stares at the black screen of the TV he forgot to plug in. He thinks maybe he’ll take a bath after they hang up. He thinks maybe he shouldn’t have moved out to LA before Shane finished up his degree program. Like he’d meant to settle things and then can’t find the way to settle down. He thinks about the way that dogs turn around three times before they lay down.

“Yeah,” he says eventually.

Shane hums again. Ryan gets the impression this isn’t how he thought the conversation would go when he called; Ryan gets the impression that none of this is how he thought it would be.

“Well don’t worry, man. I’m only a couple months away and then I’ll be right there with you.” Ryan smiles, miles and miles away, because that’s true. Still, Ryan’s a worrier. So he worries.

\---

The airport is a nightmare. The traffic is hell the whole way down and the place is packed full and wild; a barely organized riot of people who don’t want to be there. Still, he has a lot of joy in him. He still has his apartment. His new job seems really cool. And in less than an hour he’s going to see Shane again; finally, finally, a friendly face in front of him. So he sits at the airport bar and he has a couple drinks and he ignores the way the guy at the other end keeps sizing him up. And he checks his phone, over and over again. He looks up to see that the dude is closer now, is walking toward him with a slick grin on his mouth and tears in his eyes like he just took a shot.

“Now pardon the intrusion, kid, but it seems to me like you might’ve gotten stood up,” he says instead of an introduction. His voice is low and slow and sugar sweet; something fetid about it, like treacle in the gut. Ryan goes to speak but the guy continues, “now now, no need to say anything. The way you’re looking down at your phone every two minutes and sad enough to break a guy’s heart says it all. So listen, how about you let me buy you a couple drinks. ‘ve been stood up a few times in my day.”

Ryan just quirks an eyebrow at him. “I can’t imagine why,” he says before checking the time again. The guy just laughs, too big a laugh. Too big and too rough.

“Well aren’t you a little firecracker. What, you think you’re too good for me, pretty boy?” the guy says.

“I know he’s too good for you,” Shane says from over the guy’s shoulder. “Come on, pretty boy. We’re getting out of here,” he continues and Ryan laughs. He jumps up from his seat, and walks around the guy to get to Shane; to see him there in front of him and to hear his voice is something he’s thought about so much it almost seems unreal. When Shane pulls him into a hug, it feels real enough. They make it out of the airport quickly, barely speaking in their rush to get through the bustle of the crowd. Once they step outside though, Shane laughs. “I hope that guy wasn’t talking to you long,” he says and Ryan shakes his head.

“Thankfully just a few minutes. What a creep,” he says and Shane smiles. “Thanks for saving me, but I was about to tell him off,” Ryan says. He isn’t sure why he says it.

“Don’t worry, _pretty boy_ , I know you can take care of yourself. I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity.”

“Shut up, dude. Stop calling me that.”

“But it’s true,” Shane says and they laugh while they climb into the car and they keep laughing while they chat the whole drive to Ryan’s apartment. He unlocks the door and Shane walks in, takes a long look while he drops his bag by the door.

“How long are you in town for?” Ryan asks and Shane just shrugs. He drops it, but it sticks around his head.

He spends the whole night so thankful to have noise in the apartment, to have some other living breathing person there to fill up the spaces that he can hardly focus on the movie they watch. “I’ve missed you, dude,” he says eventually, looking over from the screen to see Shane grinning over at him. “Same,” Shane agrees. He lets the quiet rest there a moment, and then he sighs.

“This is going to sound ridiculous, but I don’t want you to leave,” Ryan says. Shane looks like he was about to speak and he laughs.

“Thank God. I was so nervous to say this but, I’m not.”

Ryan is just confused, looks at Shane like a stranger. “I’m having my stuff shipped over dude. There’s no way I’m gonna let you live in LA alone,” Shane says. Maybe it’s the beer. Maybe it’s the scene at the airport. But Ryan feels bright and shining right now, so he leans in and grabs Shane’s shoulders and he kisses him. And Shane just smiles against his lips and wraps his arms around him and pulls him close.

“Fuck,” Shane says, “that all went a _lot_ better than I expected.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from Florence & The Machine - Ship To Wreck


	3. hall of mirrors

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Got a request for Shyan bodyswap. So I wrote this? Idk what this is? Easily one of the most... unique things I've written I'd say.
> 
> Warning for... I don't even know. Bodyswap showering. A complete lack of logic. Selfsucking? Abstract selfsucking?

The first thing he notices is that the ceiling seems much further away when he stands up and leans back to stretch. The second thing he notices is that his arms don’t look quite right when he pulls them in front of him to stretch out his shoulders; his arms are suddenly more toned, more muscled, and more tanned than they were when he went to bed. Then he walks into the bathroom and stops dead while he stares into the mirror. Because he isn’t himself, today.

His first thought is that this is a dream. So he pees and he doesn’t look down at “himself” the whole time, and then he goes back and lies down and tries to go back to sleep, but now that he’s become aware of this sudden shift he can’t stop thinking about it. So he grabs the phone on the nightstand (which isn’t his phone, and not his nightstand, and not his room or his bed) and he tries to call someone. He realizes he doesn’t know the password to unlock it. He sighs, wearily, and it’s the first noise he’s made out loud and it sounds foreign, coming out of a mouth that isn’t his mouth.

In the end, he thinks at least it’s Saturday and he doesn’t have to go to work. So he gets dressed and he sets off onto a street he recognizes but which isn’t his own, and he heads toward the one person who might know what’s going on.

\---

The first thing he notices is that his legs are too long and the ceiling too close and while he gets out of bed he’s walking like he’s just learning how; like a baby giraffe. Then he stumbles through the bathroom door and trips over his feet. When he stands up, he looks in the mirror and panics. This isn’t his bathroom, this isn’t his house, and this most definitely isn’t his face.

He turns and rushes back into the bedroom that isn’t his bedroom and tugs someone else’s phone off the charger and desperately tries to unlock it. Thankfully it’s set to a fingerprint, but by the time he scrolls through the contacts and finds his own name (and deals with the dissonance of seeing it, of looking through someone else’s phone) there’s a knock on his door. Or, the door anyway. He stumbles out to it and pulls it open and neither of them say anything. It feels like a dream; like everything is hazy and fake. He’s looking at himself, but not like looking in the mirror or at a photograph. He really sees himself for the first time the way that everyone else sees him.

“No wonder you always call me short,” he says. Well, Shane says. He moves Shane’s mouth and Shane’s voice comes out.

“Oh good, you’ve already realized the problem,” he says. Well, Ryan’s mouth says. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m struggling to find an explanation,” Shane says with Ryan’s face.

 

They spend hours just sitting on the couch, trying to figure out what’s going on but mostly just staring at each other (at themselves, really) in complete shock. Ryan notices that Shane is bouncing his leg absently, a habit he’d never noticed his friend had until he was forced to watch his own leg moving. “You okay?” he asks and Shane glances over, surprise written on Ryan’s face. “I have to pee,” Shane answers. Ryan winces.

“So go. It’s. Look, considering the circumstances I’m going to go ahead and say we’re just going to have to like. Get over all of that. We can take two paths after we fix all this; one where there’s just a moratorium on the whole thing or one where we work through it. But for now, I’d prefer it if you didn’t do damage to my bladder.”

Ryan’s head nods, and Shane uses his legs to stand up and walk over to the bathroom. Ryan tries not to listen, not to pay attention. He tries to think logically, like maybe some of Shane’s skepticism is still there in his brain, but his thoughts are whirling around him like winds swirling along. The toilet flushes, and the water turns on from the tap and then turns off, and then Shane walks out. There’s a blush burning on Ryan’s cheeks.

“I didn’t know you were uncircumcised,” Shane says and Ryan coughs into his fist like clearing his throat. “Can we… how are we going to deal with this?” he asks.

“With my foreskin?” Ryan questions. Shane blushes deeper, looks like he has a fever.

“No you idiot. With **this** ,” he says, gesturing wildly between the two of them. Between himself and himself.

“Well I don’t fucking know, dude. I’m just as confused as you are! And now I have to pee too so, here we go, I guess. The level of awkward is just climbing and climbing.” He gets up, stumbles over awkwardly on Shane’s stilt-like legs and pauses in front of the toilet. He stands there for a long time, staring resolutely at the wall, before he tugs Shane’s sweats down and grabs his best friend’s dick in his best friend’s hand. He tries not to think about it, but it all feels so strange and different and off; the distance to the ground and the feeling of the dick in his hand and everything just piling up and up into a long list of things that they’re going to have to repress, definitely. Screw the two paths, this is all just getting buried and forgotten as soon as they figure out how to switch back.

\---

It turns out neither of them have any sort of plan, and the afternoon passes by slowly. As the sun sets they just keep getting more and more anxious.

“We should get some sleep,” Ryan says. Shane looks up at him, just another thing that feels so unnatural. Just another ringing dissonance in his ears; ringing louder and louder like an alarm; panic coiling tight. “Maybe you should stay,” he says suddenly. It’s like he could see the way that his own body was readying to get up. “Yeah. I mean, it’s your place, anyway. And we should just stick together until we figure all of this out.”

Shane nods, slowly. “Well I… you... “ he points to the body he’s in “your body needs a shower, dude. And based on my memory of last night mine probably does too.” Last night. A haunted brewery, drinks afterward. Something hazy just outside the edge of his memory. Drinks and drinks and then a long cab ride home. Something just before the driver dropped Shane off.

Ryan winces. “This is so awkward,” he says. Shane shrugs. “Well, I guess… What would be less awkward? Showering one at a time and not making eye contact for a while? Getting way too acquainted with each other’s bodies?”

Shane shrugs again. “What’s the alternative?”

\---

Shane is grateful that his apartment has a large enough shower for two. If they’d tried this at Ryan’s place it would have been a disaster, the both of them cramped together and everything so close. First, Shane’s body stands under the spray of the water and Shane lets Ryan handle everything above the waist. He wants to crack a joke about not being able to reach his head to shampoo anyway, but he isn’t sure this is the time for levity. Then he’s staring at his own stomach, his own chest, his own legs and ass and dick. It’s a striking moment, like suddenly everything has broken a ceiling and reached a new level of absurd. “Well, here goes nothing,” he says. And then he watches fascinated as he soaps up Ryan’s hands and he reaches out and ghosts his fingers down his own stomach. Ryan sighs, and flutters Shane’s eyelids shut. As his hand skims south he gets the most bizarre sense of deja vu of his life; because he’s done this before a million times, right, but this time he’s doing it but not feeling it. He runs his hands all over his own legs, kneeling down and thinking _so this is what my girlfriends saw_ before shaking the thought away. He keeps his eyes trained on Ryan’s hands, sliding up and down along his legs. He moves upward, some, and instead focuses on his own face while Ryan sighs and tilts his head back.

“This is going to be interesting,” Ryan says. Then he shuts up abruptly because Shane thinks to hell with it and just reaches out and grabs his own dick. The cognitive dissonance, of feeling the familiar weight in his hand but not **feeling** the hand on it. He soaps it up, sliding Ryan’s hand back and forth and then reaching up with the other to clean his balls too. He ignores the way the dick is stiffening in his - Ryan’s - hands. The way that Ryan is breathing heavily. He ignores the way that the vision of Ryan’s long fingers wrapped around his dick has played in his fantasies before, and the way that he gets to watch it play out from a different view than he’d ever imagined. “Jesus,” Ryan sighs. “This is… So weird.”

“I know,” Shane says. He has the strangest feeling. He feels like he wants to do something brave and foolish. He’s staring at his own dick and he’s never been very flexible and he might never get a chance like this again, so once he’s finished soaping up his own body and turns Ryan back to face him again he leans forward slowly. “Would it be alright if I… just, out of curiosity… for science… can I?” Shane babbles. He glances up and sees his own eyes locked on him, a heat in them that he’s never personally witnessed. “It’s your body,” Ryan says quietly. The _but it’s my mouth_ hangs in the air like the steam around them.

\---

In the morning, they wake up curled together in Shane’s bed. Ryan looks up and sees Shane, and it takes much longer than he would have liked for him to realize what that means. “Shane holy shit!” he says, startling his friend awake. “We switched back!”

Shane looks down at him (like normal) and grins. He leans in and presses a kiss to Ryan’s mouth and smiles into it. “Well lucky us,” he says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title is a song title from The Distillers.


	4. seeing is believing (baby close your eyes)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My friend gave me a prompt: Two guys find a unicorn and the unicorn marries them. So; Shyan.
> 
> Tags for absurdism, language, the sudden appearance of deer, and impromptu marriages that include the words "dude and "pal"

Okay, fine. He never really thought they would find anything paranormal or supernatural or whatever. He’d gone along with all of this mostly for an excuse to spend way more time with Ryan than was probably healthy without their coworkers bringing it up all the time. He’s convinced himself that Ryan’s just a really cool dude so of course they should be friends. But really, it’s more than that. It’s his eyes, it’s his hands. It’s his soft smile in the morning and big bright smile when he laughs and everything else about him, the slope of his neck and the curves of his muscled arms. The surprising strength and the unyielding bravery when he looks down all his fears in the face.

Anyway, Shane never thought they would run into anything legitimately odd so he’s a bit out of his element when they step off of the forest trail and into a meadow and see a fucking unicorn.

It isn’t pure white like it might be in some movie. It’s a shimmering haze of pastels, a duochrome effect kaleidoscoping in the sunlight. The horn is a spiraling sharp point. Its mane is silvery like gossamer strands of a spider’s web. They both freeze, and it hasn’t looked up from the flowers and grass its grazing on. The meadow seems still in the afternoon; magic hour; the sun just dipping below the treeline. Ryan’s hand grips tight around his elbow, and he looks over to see an expression that must mirror his own: shock.

They look back over and that’s when the unicorn looks up at them. Straight at them, not a single fear in its eyes. They look back at each other and then Shane slowly raises his camera. It turns off just as the hooves come into frame, and Ryan’s camera beeps twice to signal its own demise. “Holy shit,” Shane says and Ryan smacks his arm. The unicorn snorts, seems to tilt its expression into one of annoyance.

“ _What do you two want_?” it seems to ask; as if it speaks in their heads. They look back at each other, back at the unicorn. Shane is beginning to suspect a hallucination. “ _Rather, what do you need_?” it seems to say.

Shane is only mildly surprised when it prances gaily over to them and nuzzles up to Ryan’s waiting hand. His smile is endless like the afternoon. The unicorn ducks its head and then gently pushes Ryan toward Shane. His arms raise on reflex and catch him as he stumbles. Shane looks down at the man in his arms, the man with his his hands pressed against his chest. Ryan leans in and kisses him, and the unicorn whinneys happily beside them.

“Who would have thought unicorns would support the gays?” Ryan says dryly. The unicorn snorts, something like laughter.

“ _I support the whole damn acronym, boys. Y’all want a wedding_?” it seems to ask. “ _I just got ordained_.”

Ryan’s eyes meet his, shocked. Shane laughs. He meets Ryan’s eyes and shrugs, and Ryan echoes his laugh (though a bit more hysterical). “Whattaya say, Ry? Wanna do something pointless, absurd, and completely unbelievable? Will you let this unicorn marry us, for science?”

Ryan ducks his head in, laughs against Shane’s chest. “Fuck it, why not,” he says.

“ _Oh cool. I can set something up if you want, make it seem more official. Or we can just do this now_ ,” the unicorn seems to say. Shane is certain that he’s either hallucinating or in the midst of dying or dreaming or something so at the moment he’s doing his best to just go with it. 

So they stand there in front of the unicorn, and some deer prance in, and some birds fly down and it all seems oddly familiar while Shane thinks about Disney movies.

“ _Deerly beloved, hahaha, we have gathered here today to marry these two children in front of nature itself. If anyone has any reason why these two should not be wed, get fucked and get over it. I’m a unicorn, bitch. Anyway, you two need to admit you love each other or something_.”

“I’m not really sure what to say,” Ryan says. “I uh, I love you dude.”

“I love you too, pal.”

“ _Really? Okay, whatever. Y’all got any vows_?”

“Uh, sure. Shane, meeting you was super awesome. My only dream has been to discover something paranormal with you, and now we have, I guess. I’m looking forward to spending our lives together trying to find more stuff, trying to prove it to the world.”

“ _Sweet. Shane_?”

“Wow. Is this not a dream? I thought it had to be on account of Ryan kissing me and the unicorn and all, but maybe I’m just the luckiest guy in the world. Ryan. I started doing Unsolved to get to know you. I never believed in a lot of things. Like ghosts-”

“ _Ghosts are real_ ,”

“- or like monsters or whatever. Or unicorns. Mostly I never believed that you had feelings for me, and considering this still seems like a fever dream it’ll take a while to sink in. Also did the unicorn say ghosts are real?”

“ _Well certainly some unusual vows. Now just, kiss or whatever. Whatever you want, dudes_.”

So then they lean in and kiss each other. And Shane smiles the whole time and the deer make a bunch of odd noises and this is the point where the trip must wear off, right? The fever’s got to break some time. But they keep kissing, and then the unicorn whinneys in a way that seems like it’s telling them to hurry up, or possibly that there are children present and they are getting too into it.

“Are we both insane?” Ryan asks. The unicorn whinneys again.

“ _Probably. I’m still real, though_ ,” it says.

Shane shrugs, and then says, “who cares. No one is going to believe any of this. You wanna go back to the hotel and try to come up with a reason why we don’t have footage from this trip?”

“Maybe we should go to the hotel and consummate our union and then come up with a reason why Buzzfeed paid for us to fly all the way out here?”

“ _Oh I thought I recognized you guys. Bring back Ruining History_ ,” the unicorn says.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Gerard Way - No Shows


End file.
